Are we 100 percent confident that FB is doing this because the math works out and not because the pressure from the board is to 'do something about this'? We're all aware, presumably, of cases where the corporate hierarchy demands action when the data suggests acting at all is harmful. It seems silly to assume FB is the one company immune to those pressures.
True in most cases - but probably not FB. According to Investopedia [0], Zuckerberg owns 57.9% of voting shares as of 2020-12-09. Board pressure has a lot less sway when the chairman & CEO holds such a majority.
[0]: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/insights/082216/top-9-...
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EDIT: fixed date
It worked for the last decade. They’re doubling down, unaware the dotcom 2.0 bubble is not bursting but being left behind.
Apple shipping a SOC that can do it all will trickle into Dells thinking, driven by backlash against privacy invasive grifting we can do cloud work at home.
Concerns over screen time will lead to decoupling from screens. More IOT and voice controls and other input alternatives like smart sensors.
Facebook is not a laptop, or an operating system. It’s AIM. We moved on from AIM but kept computing. The tech industry hasn’t matured. It grifted on last generations addiction to TV.
More imaginative applications are yet to come.
From which logically follows "This is something, therefore we must do it."
Yeah, the actual audience for the ad might just be "Facebook executives", and no one else, for all practical purposes.
It would be interesting to know whether any metrics (NPS, perhaps?) are even being tracked that the campaign is intended to influence, or if this marks a regression to the "half of my ad budget is wasted, I just don't know which half" days of yore.
This is what worries me the most about this. I'm seeing full front-page ads around the "Facebook stands for small businesses" mantra in India - a country where Apple is by and large insignificant in the smartphone space. I can only assume they're confident about this PR blitz, and I hope Apple doesn't drop the IDFA changes due to this.
Antitrust risk could be a factor, as the preferred treatment of ASA seems dubious - but the change seems to be coming regardless
Of course, the other half of people are running Android and I don't see Google getting on that bandwagon.
It's tempting to think of Facebook as omniscient, but I'm not sure how precisely it can be measured. Economically, yes, maybe. But morally?
Remember, the Timnit controversy ended up with letters from congress to Google's CEO. In bigcos, not everyone forecasts everything.
I wish I'd thought of a better word to use than "morally," though, since it didn't quite capture what I meant to say. I meant, people being upset about their actions is hard to quantify.
What can still happen is that the campaign backfires so quickly that hey don't have time to react. I don't know their reaction time, but they've been doing mood manipulation for long enough to think it's short.
I'm legitimately concerned it might be, if you read between the lines: https://twitter.com/RepYvetteClarke/status/13392973588158341...
Not going to say anything positive about apple here, but also nothing negative.
What would that measurement look like? What is the control group for a news cycle? What signal would you expect to see change?
So in their shoes I'd be looking at newsfeed articles about Facebook, user sentiment in the post text and the comments, and subsequent impact on UAM and DAU numbers.
In their shoes, I'd also be tracking the performative departure. I've seen a number of people post about Facebook and saying they're quitting. It wouldn't be hard to look back at what they've been reading and forward at the impact on their friends who read the post.
If I needed more data, I'd tie all this in with user surveys and user studies for deeper qualitative and quantitative data. Not sure if Facebook does those, but I know other platforms do.
That sounds like a quote from fight club and I guess you're right!
And I'm sure they're right. It's important to remember that Facebook can precisely measure the impact of news articles like this. And even without messing with the newsfeed algorithms, they have way more influence over consumer perception of Facebook than a few news articles do. For example, they could introduce some new "privacy" feature and talk it up in in-app notifications. Or they have you review your privacy settings, something most people will glance at and move on, thinking they are in control. And they can do things like this whenever consumer confidence flags.
If Facebook loses a few more users of the sort that are tech-savvy and informed enough that this pushes them over the edge, that's fine. In fact, it might be even better, as the remaining population is more easily wrangled.